We can no longer rely on think tanks to ... think

... the US is on a fiscally unsustainable trajectory towards national insolvency... There are only two options for Washington to stave off catastrophe: draconian budget cuts or reducing the real value of its debt by debasing the dollar through inflation...

... the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff portrayed the US's debt burden as "the most significant threat to our national security". Former US Treasury secretary and Harvard University president Lawrence Summers asked in 2009: "How long can the world's biggest borrower remain the world's biggest power?" The answer is: not long...

But with the US well down the road to economic perdition, Australia can no longer rely on the presumption that the US will have our back...

In politics, as in physics, a vacuum will be filled... For Australia, the $64,000 question is who will step in to the breach of strategic equilibrium triggered by the recession of US power from the western Pacific.

Will a resurgent China expand its strategic footprint by developing a real blue water navy? ...

Australian governments of both persuasions will have to fill some of that US-less strategic vacuum with a greatly enhanced Australian Defence Force...

Ted Lapkin is a research fellow at the Institute for Public Affairs

In the blogosphere, as in politics, as in physics, a vacuum will be filled. So listen to the sound of air rushing into the Institute for Public Affairs. If you listen carefully I think it sounds something like this: why are we enabling the rise of China if it's bleeding obvious that it can't be trusted and we need to spend billions arming ourselves against it? Wouldn't it be cheaper to limit the rise of China with trade sanctions and then we'd have less of a threat to worry about?

File under: the US's debt burden is only "the most significant threat to our national security" if we keep financing the rise of China with trade.